Corporations and other entities often have a number of resources and applications that are maintained on their own private secure networks. These resources are often mission critical or have large business impact to the entity. As such these resources are protected from access through the use of authentication methods and processes. This ensures that users who wish to access them are authenticated prior to granting access to the resource.
When a user attempts to access the resource from within the secure network the resource can ensure that the user has the correct credentials to access the resource. In some instances simply being on the secure network is enough. In other cases additional authentication or pre-authentication is needed. This level of authentication can easily be handled by the resources inside the network on their own.
However, in today's world entities often want to make internal resources available to users outside of the internal network while still maintaining or even increasing the level of security required for a user to access the resource from an outside network. In order to achieve this protection the administrator of the internal network must pre-configure a gateway, such as a proxy server or firewall, with information for each resource that they wish to allow access to from the outside. This includes providing the gateway with the specific authentication requirements for the resource. A user attempting to access the resource will provide to the gateway the uniform resource locator or URL for the specific resource that they wish to access. The gateway looks for the specific URL and applies the pre-configured process to the incoming request. As each individual URL must be separately configured at the gateway the administrator is required to keep the list of resources up to date as well as the specific configurations for each resource up to date as well. This is a time consuming and burdensome process for the administrator.